Intel talking to Google about Android on the Atom

It seems that Intel is having a quiet word with Google about creating Android powered smartphones that will run with Atom chips.

During the Intel cloud summit, R Ravichandran, who is Chipzilla's India and South Asia sales director, said that his outfit was working with Google on a number of different projects. Google TV, which uses Intel processors has already debuted, as have ultrabooks and tablets with Intel processors. Next year, he said, there will be smartphones with Atom cores.

Atoms have not done that well in the Tablet market, although Intel boasts that more than 35 companies have adopted this latest platform so far. But one of the problems has been that Intel has limited them to Windows 7. Now, that appears to be changing and they will also be made available for Android phones.

According to ITPro Portal theZ600 provides an average of 4 to 5 hours of battery for video viewing or cellular browsing and, surprisingly, 10 days on standby mode and two days of audio. Google released an Android version optimised for the x86 architecture for Intel's processors so it can be said that the new smartphone is not too far away. What is probably more important is the idea that Intel is cuddling up to Microsoft's long running rival Google. Could this possibly be a reaction to Vole courting ARM and opening up its Windows software to non-x86 technology?